One feels wary about reading a book set in an Indian slum, moreover a slum about to be demolished. Is it going to be another book of poverty porn, meant for the delectation of readers on the other side of the social divide? Is it meant to wrench a few self-righteous tears from the eyes of charitable First World readers? What is the subject position of the author? Is she one of ‘them’ or part of the privileged demography shedding kind light on the disadvantaged, making them glow brightly like saints in an act of overcompensation?
From the detailed author-bio at the end (“She previously served as senior policy adviser to former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, an assistant vice-president at Sesame Workshop, and a public school teacher in Texas and New York...) you know where Mathangi Subramanian stands. Unsurprisingly, there are two pages of gushing praise for the book, mostly from foreign publications.
We are the future
Subramanian’s novel is a profoundly sympathetic, sometimes empathetic, story of five young feisty girls from a Bangalore slum
called Swarga — ‘Heaven’ — who refuse to be cowed down by circumstances and sculpt their lives themselves. For all of Subramanian’s attempts at depicting actual life in the slums — the fathers who regularly beat up/ abandon their wives and family, the state that is forever sweeping their lives away in one demolition drive after another, the parents’ reluctance to educate girl children and eagerness to marry them off early, thus unwittingly perpetuating the cycle of abuse/ abandonment — there is a fairytale-like quality to A People’s History of Heaven .
Glossed over
The brave girls win the day, as they must, considering their profiles — Deepa is purblind, Banu is Banksy in the making, Joy is transgender, Rukshana is gay, Padma is a migrant with a mentally ill mother. The five of them make up a kind of chorus, the collective “we”, which recites the story of each and her family, but also looks beyond the particulars to a future of hope, of strength in sisterhood.
When they falter, they get the necessary push from the fairy godmother, their school principal, Janaki Ma’am, who helps them with money, biryani, scholarship and the promise that single women can be happy too, as she is. And then there’s the poetry of Subramanian’s prose — Janaki Ma’am has “[h]air the colour of wishes, eyes cut like broken stones”; Rukshana’s “elbow peeks out like a cat’s nose” from the hole in her sleeve — which softens the rough edges by bringing another, mellower, world to Swarga.
All this makes A People’s History an excellent YA crossover novel, but it isn’t intellectually challenging enough to work as adult fiction.
There are issues touched upon and then glossed over: Bangalore as a “city of befores” — that once-upon-a-time oasis of green shade and rippling lakes hammered into a metropolis by “engineers”; the outsider/ native debate translating into a Kannada versus Hindi versus English debate; the need to hide the unseemly as the city becomes a hub of shiny malls; the luckless rejects who lose out in the process, whether to “crooked” politicians or to the administration with its various ‘welfare’ schemes, like the one under which Deepa’s mother is sterilised; and following from all this, the factions that get radicalised, like the Hindu boys in Swarga who suddenly sport saffron clothes and parrot slogans picked up from right-wing zealots.
But these incidents somehow brush past the “we” in a singsong way — the implication, it seems, is that the sisterhood will survive them all. The author, the ultimate fairy godmother, will not deny them their moment in the sun, up there on Padma’s roof, the evil men in bulldozers driven away, the friends lying together on each other’s laps “like a quilt of girls”.
As a migrant to Bangalore, I felt guilty about the lament of Banu’s ajji about a greener, almost pastoral Bangalore, knowing that the contrast must be stark. But I was flummoxed at the repeated references to Bangalore’s heat, and at one place to its “salty air”. Effects of a changing climate notwithstanding, persistent heat or humidity is hardly the defining feature of this landlocked city.
anusua.m@thehindu.co.in
A People’s History of Heaven; Mathangi Subramanian, Hamish Hamilton, ₹599
